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Paradise Lost: Biosphere Retooled as Atmospheric Nightmare

The exotic species of ant known as Paratrechina longicornus, or the crazy ant, named for its speedy and erratic behavior when excited, somehow managed to kill off all the other ants over the years, as well as the crickets and grasshoppers.

Swarms of them crawled over everything in sight: thick foliage, damp pathways littered with dead leaves and even a bearded ecologist in the humid rain forest of Biosphere 2, an eight-story, glass-and-steel world in the wilds of the Sonora Desert that cost $200 million to build.

''These little guys pretty much run the food web,'' Dr. Tony Burgess, the ecologist, said as he tapped a dark frond, sending dozens of the ants into a frenzy. ''Until we understand the ecology, we're reluctant to eliminate them.''

Columbia University, an icon of the Ivy League, is struggling to turn a utopian failure into a scientific triumph.

The university took over management of Biosphere 2 in January and is starting to reveal just how badly things went awry when four men, four women and 4,000 species of plants and animals were sealed inside this giant terrarium for a two-year experiment that ended in 1993.

The would-be Eden became a nightmare, its atmosphere gone sour, its sea acidic, its crops failing, and many of its species dying off. Among the survivors are crazy ants, millions of them.

Rather than aiming to recreate paradise, Columbia is now working to make and sustain its opposite -- a kind of atmospheric hell that threatens to choke the globe late next century with high temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide, a principal agent of global warming. Some organisms in the experiment are expected to thrive, and others to die.

To that end, Columbia is now clearing out old growths and animals, planning new ones and beginning to subdivide the would-be paradise into experimental plots, curious to see if the three acres of futuristic domes here can serve as a scientific testbed for anticipating the effects of a warming climate, and perhaps avoiding negative ones.

Over five years, the bill for the retooling is expected to reach about $40 million, for science and educational programs as well as new construction.

''It's a challenge,'' Dr. William C. Harris, the new president of Biosphere 2, said of the transformation as he sat in his office, with the Santa Catalina Mountains visible out his window. ''This facility was not designed for these kind of experiments.''

Most ecologic research is done outdoors, he noted, and no one has ever before tried to bring it inside on so vast a scale, replete with experimental controls and all the rigor that modern science can muster.

''You can think about doing experiments like you might do in chemistry or physics, where you change things, where you stress the system and see how it responds,'' said Dr. Harris, a physical chemist by training and most recently an official of the National Science Foundation, the Government's main agency for financing basic research.

''The potential is so significant that -- if we can turn this into an experimental tool -- it will resolve questions that cannot be answered otherwise. It will influence how we think about the rest of the world.''

Trucks and construction crews now swarm over the desert site as Columbia nears a milestone in its takeover. On Nov. 25, the Biosphere will open to the public for the first time, at least part of it.

The old habitation area of the Biospherians, as the eight men and women called themselves, has been sealed off from the rest of the domes and transformed into a visitor center full of exhibits on climatic change. It is the first of the subdivisions.

Inside, visitors can learn not only about how the planet is warming but can tour old Biospherian residences and learn something of the glass ark's woes, of how the crew lost weight, got sick and began to grow paranoid about food theft.

''One thing I like about Columbia is that they're getting the history out,'' said Gilbert LaRoque, a Biosphere guide who started working here in 1991, when the first human crew was sealed inside. ''We watched one Biospherian drop in weight from 260 to 150 pounds.''

Work on Biosphere 2 (so named because its creators viewed earth as Biosphere 1) began in earnest around 1984, financed by Edward P. Bass, the Texas billionaire and oil heir. The aim was to have human inhabitants thrive in a miniature world made of a sea, savanna, mangrove swamp, rain forest, desert and farm, the areas and atmospheres interacting to form a totally independent life-support system.

It was a bold test of the Gaia hypothesis, proposed in 1972 by an Englishman, James Lovelock. The theory holds that the earth and its living creatures evolved together in a self-regulating system that maintains conditions that are optimum for life.

The first crew entered in September 1991 and left two years later, thin and tight-lipped about the effort to mimic the earth's natural harmonies.

Columbia and its advisers are now revealing the details of the grim tale, summarized in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Science. Dr. Joel E. Cohen of Rockefeller University and Dr. David Tilman of the University of Minnesota write that the planned utopia was torn asunder by ''unexpected problems and surprises.''

Not only did oxygen levels plummet from 21 percent to 14 percent, barely sufficient to keep the Biospherians alive, but carbon dioxide skyrocketed along with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Its strength may have been sufficient, the authors say, to ''reduce vitamin B12 synthesis to a level that can impair or damage the brain.''

Morning glory vines, introduced to soak up carbon dioxide, exploded in number and overran other plants, including food crops. Large trees became brittle and prone to catastrophic collapse. Nineteen of 25 vertebrate species went extinct, as did all pollinators, dooming most plants to seedlessness. Most insects died off, except for katydids, cockroaches and crazy ants.

Air temperatures soared higher than expected and the light filtering through glass panes was surprisingly dim, the authors say. Too much rain turned desert areas into chaparral or grasslands.

Drawing an analogy to the Hubble Space Telescope, whose flaws were eventually fixed, the Science authors say the refurbished domes in the Arizona desert might eventually ''contribute exciting insights into the task of maintaining the viability of Biosphere 1 -- the Earth.''

Perched on an arid hillside northeast of Tucson is a large sign surrounded by sand, gravel and cactuses. ''Welcome to the Biosphere 2 Campus and Visitor Center,'' it reads, ''an earth systems research and education center affiliated with Columbia University.''

Admission is $12.95 for adults, $10.95 for the elderly, $6 for children aged 6 to 17, and free to children under 6. The sprawling site is spread over hundreds of acres. Shops sell rain forest candy and Biosphere books, postcards and T-shirts.

Dr. Harris, the new president and executive director, explained that the campus planned to become financially self-sufficient in about five years, generating income from sales, research and student tuition. This fall, 25 undergraduates began a semester in earth studies, and enrollment is expected to grow eventually to perhaps 100 students.

At the core of the campus are five scientific faculty members, five scientific staff members and eventually as many as 30 or so outside groups from around the world who visit periodically to conduct research under the glass domes.

''Columbia is the only institution that's had the courage to make this dramatic a commitment to the environment,'' Dr. Harris said as he walked in the bright Arizona sunlight toward domes, now filled with remnants of the failed dream.

Large plants and banana fronds pressed up against the glass in chaotic disarray, hardy survivors all.

In the domes on a balcony overlooking the farm, the air was hot and somewhat fetid. Surviving crops had been removed, and planners are now assessing how to dispose of soil contaminated with a pathogenic nematode, a tiny worm that ate crop roots.

''It's unknown elsewhere in Arizona, so we're under a quarantine,'' said Dr. Burgess, a desert ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a Biosphere consultant. ''The State Department of Agriculture won't us let us take it out until these soils are sterilized.''

Arcing over the farm are three cylindrical domes. The area is eventually to be subdivided into three experimental plots, each with differing temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide. Possible trees to be grown here include redbud, sweetgum and loblolly pine.

Plantings are to be as uniform as possible so changes caused by the differing atmospheres can be carefully documented and studied.

The wilderness regions of the domes are also to be subdivided at two spots -- where the rain forest meets the central sea and savanna, and where the central areas meet the desert. In all, there are to be a total of six atmospherically distinct study areas.

''For experimental design,'' Dr. Burgess said, ''this facility is a nightmare because no part of it is like any other part.''

Big leaves fell periodically in the rain forest, where wooden planks had been laid down as pathways. Ants now monopolized them. At the moment, carbon dioxide levels are 571 parts per million, up from about 340 parts per million outside the domes.

''There's more carbon dioxide variability in here daily than in the past 10,000 years out there,'' Dr. Burgess said. ''It's a big management challenge,'' caused mainly by the day-and-night cycles of plants and the biochemistry of photosynthesis.

Near the beach in the simulated ocean area, Dr. Burgess picked up the flower of a morning glory. ''Everybody loved them at first because they were so pretty,'' he said. ''But nothing would eat them. They took over.''

A temporary plastic partition had been set up between the ocean area and the desert. Suddenly, the rush of air on the desert side was fresher and cooler. ''Biosphere 2 taught us we're not quite ready to manage the planet,'' said Dr. Burgess, examining some battered cactuses.

''When you see the complex dynamics here, you start to understand that the climate models may have some large error bars,'' added Dr. Harris, the new president.

Outside the domes, he said that transforming the failed dream into a scientific test would take at least another year of hard work and planning and, even then, there were no guarantees of success. It was a true experiment, with many unknowns.

''The first thing is to open it up to the scientific community, to get them involved,'' he said. ''It's been a closed facility. They need to know that Columbia is now running this, and it's going to be run the way a major university would run this, openly and competitively, and that the best ideas will prevail.''

Later, over a Mexican dinner, Dr. Harris grew visibly excited about the possibility of building more glass experimental areas out among the cactuses; the seasoned administrator turned into a new kind of desert dreamer.